Renato Guttuso at La Scala
by Vittoria Crespi Morbio.
Essay by Vittoria Crespi Morbio, The Sky Ablaze.
Biography. Guttuso at La Scala. Onstage and in the Wings. Chronology of the Productions.
Amici della Scala – Grafiche Step Editrice, Parma 2019.
Italian – English edition, pp. 201.
For Renato Guttuso (1911-1987) working for the theatre was not only an outlet for his creativity, but also the opportunity for a civic commitment shared by other figures of Italian culture: Alberto Moravia, Gianandrea Gavazzeni, Eduardo De Filippo, Nino Rota, Luciano Berio, Aurel Milloss. From the first instance, the unfortunate Gita in campagna by Mario Peragallo (1954), to the last production, Verdi’s The Force of Destiny with a cast of stars (1978), Guttuso’s four stagings for La Scala evince the incisiveness of his stage language, the coherence with his pictorial style and a poetry steeped in the tragic, glowing Mediterranean world, in opera as well as in the ballet Love, The Magician by Manuel de Falla (1962). A different perspective for appreciating the modernity of an artist who deserves to be disengaged from the ebb and flow of fashions.